In bid to make smaller, cheaper chips for cellphones and tablets, S.D.’s Cymer working on improving extreme ultraviolet devices

Taking the next step to make chips even smaller has been a technological challenge. Yet it’s vital for the industry that is increasingly going mobile.

“Mobile means battery-operated devices, and we want to make these devices work longer and longer,” said Mushell of Gartner. “The only way to do that is to have (chip) geometries that are smaller and smaller.”

For years, Cymer has been a market leader in making semiconductor production lasers used by giant chip makers such as Intel and Samsung. The company’s current lasers, known as Deep Ultraviolet lithography, produce lines in circuit patterns to carry electrical current down to about 32 nanometers in size.

To get an idea of how small that is, a very fine human hair is about 10,000 nanometers wide.

To go even smaller than that, Cymer is focused on EUV technology.

A key hurdle for EUV lasers has been ratcheting up power levels for mass production. Chip makers want to run their assembly lines as fast as possible. The more power flowing through EUV lasers, the less time a silicon wafer needs to be exposed to the light, which allows semiconductor makers to speed up production.

Chip makers eventually want EUV lasers to blast wafers at 250 watts of power. For much of past year, the best Cymer and others have been able to produce is 10 watts. At that power level, the wafer must sit in front of the light beams for a relatively long time before the circuit pattern takes.

“These (laser) machines are attached to a lot of other machines in that production line,” said Mushell. “You probably have $20 million or $30 million (in equipment) patched together. If one slows down, it slows everything down.”

In late February, Cymer ran one of its EUV laser systems in a demonstration for six hours at 40 watts of power. It delivered stable doses of light.

It also demonstrated a one-hour run at 55 watts with similar dose stability.

“The jump to 40 watts is a significant boost and the next step in the timeline for EUV power sources,” said Dean Freeman, a research vice president at Gartner.

There’s a long way to go. But Cymer thinks it will be able to boost the power of EUV lasers to meet chip makers’ needs.

“Our goal is to reach 250 watts next year,” said Nigel Farrar, vice president of lithography application development at Cymer. “The fact that we’ve validated that it works up to the 40-watt to 50-watt level, it’s very encouraging in terms of future scaling.”

Chip makers had hoped to begin using EUV lithography this year or next. But delays in getting the technology in the field at sufficient power levels has led many chip makers to now expect EUV production to ramp up later.

In the meantime, chip makers have been using tricks to extend the life of existing chip production equipment, such as double patterning, to keep reducing chip size.

“EUV is the next big thing and has been for a long time,” said Jim Handy, an analyst with market research firm Objective Analysis. “But these people who do (semiconductor production,) who are geniuses, they have figured out ways to forestall having to go to EUV.”